December 2009 Blog Posts (17)

The video chatroom on schola has seen a lot of action recently - and seems to be developing quite nicely.

There is currently a regular Comenius reading group - it does not have a schedule - lead by Molendinarius, this group is reading through Schola Ludus. When it meets, an email is sent out to all members of Schola, who, if they are at a computer and have some free time, can log in and participate.

Laura Gibbs will be setting up a regular Vulgate reading group. This will… Continue

Please consider administering the National Mythology Exam or the Exploratory Latin Exam this year! Or talk to an English or History teacher about the how they can use the exam to supplement their curriculum and bring national recognition to their students!

The National Mythology Exam sponsored by the ETC (Excellence Through Classics, a standing committee of the American Classical League) is designed for students in grades 3 through 9. The format of the exam is multiple choice… Continue

Three days ago, the usual suspects were chatting away in the viva voce locutorium when someone had the idea to message everyone in Schola (over 1200 members now).
Suddenly, the locutorium came alive, faces we had never seen before appeared, and the conversation went on for some hours.
Yesterday we did the same thing again - this time, the regulars had been given… Continue

Earn a $125,000 salary and join a team of master teachers at The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School, recently featured on the front page of the New York Times: (http://www.tepcharter.org/nytimes.php).

TEP is a new 480-student 5th through 8th grade middle school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Applications are currently being accepted for teaching positions in Math, Science, English, Social Studies, Music,… Continue

Comprehensible Input is important - but even more important, I think, is input per se - whether comprehensible or not. It is the sheer volume of material that helps your brain get to grips with new structures and word /sound patterns that are not present in the native language morpheme set. One needs to re-hear, or be re-exposed to sets of language data many hundreds of times for the information to become hard wired in the brain.

Today I finished recording all 154 chapters of Comenius' 'Orbis Sensualim Pictus', in Restored Classical pronunciation.
The book is recorded phrase by phrase in Latin-English-Latin, and can be used without reference to the actual text, although Comenius' illustrations are useful, and the text was designed to be used accompanied by the engravings.
You can find parts of the recording on Latinum

I'm trying to figure out how to import/convert the available Perseus Project .xml text files so as to be readable on an Amazon Kindle... There doesn't seem to be much posted about this topic (unless I've overlooked something obvious)--any thoughts out there?

The Rosetta Stone is one of those seminal texts - something we have all read about, and recognise the importance of - but how many have ever read it, or know anything about the contents of it?
This short reading of the Rosetta Stone in Latin, is something of a curiosity, presents Heyne's translation into Latin of the Greek text of the inscription, read in restored Classical Latin on Latinum by Evan Millner.
Heyne, Commentatio… Continue

One reason I have poured so much energy into my Latinum projects, is that I believe that large amounts of exposure to the language are needed - more hours than can be supplied in a classroom setting - to acquire fluency. Also, our students nowadays are more inclined to listen to an audiobook or a soundtrack, than to read.

I would not necessarily recommend that Latinum materials be used in the classroom - they are not specifically designed for this,(although some materials might be… Continue

"Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down in 39AD; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists." Johann Hari,… Continue